Senate sprints to recess

Cows, clunkers and the courts capture these last hot days of the Senate’s summer session with both parties now committed to completing final votes by Thursday night and following the House home.

A 60-37 roll call late Tuesday set the tone as an unlikely combination of bipartisan rural farm interests and New York Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer corralled just enough support to waive budget rules and provide $350 million to help struggling dairy farmers.

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And with a procedural agreement in hand Wednesday night, Majority Leader Harry Reid (D—Nev.) appeared confident of pulling the final pieces together.

Automakers must first beat back seven amendments but are confident of winning the transfer of an additional $2 billion to the popular “cash-for-clunkers” rebate program now predicted to generate 200,000 truck and auto sales by the end of this week. That debate follows what will be a history- making 3 p.m. vote on U.S. Supreme Court nominee Judge Sonia Sotomayor, a South Bronx native raised amid the gritty, numbered train lines of New York City — far from cows or polished new cars, for that matter.

All Senate business stopped for two hours Wednesday as Democrats held a lengthy caucus on the health care reform battle that still looms ahead this fall. But both the dairy vote Tuesday and the clunker debate expected Thursday underscore how much the economy remains a central worry for the majority party.

“The message of [Tuesday] was we have a major crisis,” Sen. Bernie Sanders, the Vermont independent, told POLITICO. “The point is we have to stand together and fight our way out of this recession.”

“This is not Ph.D. political science here,” Sanders said. “Not every state has an economy that is significantly dependent on the dairy industry. But I don’t have any auto manufacturers, any Ford plants, in Vermont. If you see the collapse of the auto industry, you have to be sensitive, and in the same sense, people want to save family-based agriculture in this country.”

Schumer, a brash New Yorker with upstate dairy farmers of his own, helped to turn two Virginia Democrats, Sens. Mark Warner and Jim Webb, whom he had helped elect during his tenure at the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. And for all the talk of cost containment in health care, five senators in the bipartisan Group of Six or G-6 negotiations — including Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad (D-N.D.) — backed more spending to help the dairy industry.

Allies of the “cash for clunkers” initiative are betting that the same sentiment will prevail in their favor Thursday, when the Senate takes up a House-passed bill providing an additional $2 billion for the clunker program.

“I don’t see any bandwagon building against this,” Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood told POLITICO. And he predicts a combination of factors — including the fact that automakers are beginning to run out of some of the more popular vehicles — means the added money will carry the program through Labor Day.

“The program will end when we’re out of money,” LaHood said, suggesting that something of a breather will follow, giving time for Congress to take stock of what the effect has been. Thus far, the statistics compiled by his department show the Big Three American automakers are holding their own in terms of market share of new vehicles purchased, and the overall improvement in gasoline mileage continued to be larger than required to qualify for the rebates worth between $3,500 and $4,500.